Today when I picked up the newspaper, countless back-to-school ads tumbled out! How can this be? Where did the summer go? I am sure many of you are feeling that way as well, but also looking forward to the excitement of a new school year.

Hopefully, you had a chance to take some sort of a vacation this summer – to get away for a little bit – whether it was to camp in the woods or stay in a hotel in a city. When I travel, I usually get the chance to read “USA Today” in the mornings rather than our local Portland paper and I am always struck by the way the paper uses visual learning techniques to communicate information in the "snapshot" graphics that are peppered throughout the paper. Just one small box at the top of the Education page tells the reader what books kids are reading this summer, using a graphic organizer and illustrations to break it down by age, gender and genre! Less than two square inches of newsprint tell me a whole story!

The paper also pioneered publishing the daily weather map in color and with graphics so that readers could “see” the weather as well as read about it. Many papers around the country have adopted this visual way to report the weather.

As you well know, no one has to convince me of the power of visual learning, but I am constantly amazed at the many places in our day-to-day life where I see it used to effectively communicate information.

Where do you see visual learning in your daily life? And where do you wish you saw it?